This invention relates generally to social networking, and in particular to providing a hardware switch that manages automatic and manual communication between a mobile device and a social networking system.
Social networking systems commonly provide mechanisms allowing users to interact with the social networking system using a mobile device, such as a mobile phone. The user of a mobile device may interact with the social networking system in various ways, both by receiving communications from the social networking system and transmitting communications to the social networking system. “Communications” as used herein refers to any type of information sent between the mobile device and social networking system. Examples of communications include photographs, location information, phone calls, text messages, email messages, mobile device application data and notifications.
Mobile devices may automatically receive communications from a social networking system. For example, a social networking system may transmit a message to a mobile device from a friend of the user of the mobile device without any explicit action by the user of the mobile device. Likewise, a social networking system may automatically transmit a notification to the user of a mobile device indicating that it is the user's turn in a social networking system game. Mobile devices may also automatically transmit communications to a social networking system. For example, a mobile device may have location-detection functionality, and may be set to transmit the location of the user of the mobile device to the social networking system without explicit action by the user of the mobile device. Likewise, a mobile device may automatically transmit photographs taken by the mobile device to the social networking system.
The automatic transmission of communications between a mobile device and a social networking system provides an efficient way to transfer information by minimizing the amount of input required by a user of the mobile device. Automatically transmitting communications is not always ideal, however, as user may want to prevent the transmission of certain communications to and from a social networking system. For instance, a user concerned with privacy may want to prevent the transmission of certain location information to the social networking system. Likewise, a user who wants to minimize interruptions may want to prevent the reception of certain notifications from the social networking system. Thus, a solution is needed that allows a mobile device user to efficiently switch between a communication mode that allows one or more types of automatic communications to and from a social networking system (“social mode”) and a communication mode that requires user authorization for communications to and from a social networking system (“manual mode”).